Robert M. Christie Views the Future as if Facts Matter.

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Scapegoating for the Oligarchs, or Not

Ruling elites routinely distract their subject people by directing attention to individuals or ethnic groups as ‘the enemy,’ and it routinely works. As long as people are distracted by arguments over ethnic and individual culpability and conflict, the oligarchy wins. We could discuss the dominance of the English-American elite over the American economy and politics after the revolutionary war and their continued dominance thereafter, excluding the Scots-Irish immigrants and later many other ethnic groups from full political and economic participation, but to what avail?

The big mistake is to reduce problems resulting from economic inequities to the characteristics of individuals or ethnic groups. Today’s central banking cartel transcends national borders and ethnic categories, yet it benefits from any distraction of public awareness by scapegoating, including re-coded American racism, blaming immigrants for job losses, and plain old anti-Semitism.

The bottom line is structural; we live in a political economy of oligarchy, with a new twist that Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism” – a new form of fascism with a thin ‘democratic’ facade. You could waste your time tracking the ethnicity of all bankers, only to find a mix of whatever proportion, yet it would not matter. Their allegiance is to the financial elite of which they are members. Their Fox News minions call them the ‘job creators,’ even as they move their capital overseas to the labor markets they can exploit more cheaply. The oligarchy has various historical elements, but its current structure of power is what matters, and that is not an ethnic structure, it is the political-economic-financial structure of the corporate state. That is what needs to be directly faced and dealt with by ordinary citizens through concerted action.

Any chance for the people to prevail and for equity and democracy to survive will result only when people in communities recognize the fact that the larger system is way out of democratic control. It is not immigrants, Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, or even terrorists who cause the problems most people feel directly in the form of depressed wages, underemployment, unemployment, lack of access to quality education, loss of access to voting, the decline of municipal infrastructures, growing police brutality and gun violence, a congress that refuses to respond to economic crises on Main street, not just on Wall Street, etc. Oligarchy thrives on oppression and distraction. Most societal problems are symptoms of economic and political oppression, and elite delusions of empire. Most Americans know that “the system is rigged,” and the economic cards are stacked against them. We also know that we can’t fight it alone. Anger breeds prejudice and discrimination; easy targets are presented to distract us. But only a turn toward positive concerted action can really help.

Because of the lock-up of national politics and economic policy by the oligarchs, the only ways left for ordinary people to survive and to thrive are strategies to create our own locally controlled institutions within communities and to withdraw participation from the giant institutions controlled by the Oligarchs.

Move your money from the Big Banks to local credit unions. Cancel Big-Bank credit cards and use local credit union cards. Start community banks. Divest savings from the fossil-fuel oligarchs and invest in socially responsible funds and local ecologically sound enterprises. Organize community solar and wind generating systems. Buy local. Reduce consumption from marketing-driven wants; buy to satisfy actual needs. Withdrawal from the international trade and industrial production system will stimulate opportunities in local economies in which individuals and families can participate and exercise control. That, of course, will not be an easy transition; it will require much cultural change and will be resisted by the oligarchs. But it will be an invigorating, transformational stimulus to a free and open society.